With the rapid development of science and technologies, wireless network communication technologies have advanced to the generation of Long Term Evolution (LTE). According to the specifications of the LTE standard, an MTC apparatus (e.g., a smart electricity meter, various kinds of sensors, and etc.) with data that needs to be uploaded to an LTE base station must request a resource from the LTE base station via a contention-based random access procedure. When a large amount of MTC apparatuses in the LTE network have data to be uploaded to the LTE base station at the same time, the random access channel (RACH) in the control plane of the LTE network can become congested.
From the technical document No. TR 37.868 issued by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), for smart energy saving applications, one LTE base station serves more than 30,000 smart electricity meters in the suburban area of London on average. Furthermore, for taxi management applications, there are about 72 random access channel instructions per second around Beijing Capital International Airport. This means that each transmission request needs 36 preambles on average to be successfully accepted. By using conventional transmission mechanisms designed by the LTE standards for MTC apparatuses, the presence of numerous MTC apparatuses within the coverage of an LTE base station would cause a high collision probability, too many random access channel instructions, and a time delay.
Accordingly, there is still an urgent need for a wireless resource scheduling and transmission mechanism for MTC apparatuses conforming to the LTE standards.